George Green Medal 2018 Ceremony

The New Forest, UK – 11 September 2018

The George Green Medal 2018 was presented on the occasion of the 41st International Conference on Boundary Elements and other Mesh Reduction Methods (BEM/MRM 41). The ceremony took place during a special session on Tuesday 11th September, followed by a keynote address from the medal recipient.

The George Green Medal was established by the University of Mississippi at Oxford, Mississippi, USA, and the Wessex Institute and is supported by Elsevier. It is in honour of the man who single-handedly set up the basis for the modern Boundary Element Method, among other notable achievements.

The Medal is awarded to those scientists who have carried out original work with practical applications in the field of Boundary Elements and other Mesh Reduction Methods, continuing in this manner to further develop the pioneering ideas of George Green. They are also persons of the highest integrity who, by sharing their knowledge, have helped to establish research groups all around the world. The Medal is given once a year and is presented during the BEM/MRM Conference.

George Green (1793-1841)

George Green was a self-taught genius who mysteriously delivered one of the most influential mathematics and physics works of all time. He educated himself in mathematics and self-published the work “An Essay on the Application of Mathematical Analysis to the Theories of Electricity and Magnetism”. In his very first article he derived the Green’s first, second and third identities, forged the concept of Green’s function, and solved the problem of electrical potential created by a single charge placed inside a spherical metal shell. The ideas of Green’s function forever changed the landscape of science, as many physics and mathematics problems have been solved using this technique. As Green died early, and his work was discovered only posthumously, it remains a mystery today how Green could produce such a masterpiece without the guidance of a great teacher or school and, in fact, without a formal education. Only recently, due to the advent of powerful computers, has it been possible to take full advantage of Green’s pioneering developments.

Prof Ney Augusto Dumont

The recipient of the 2018 Medal was Prof Ney Augusto Dumont, Professor and Head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil.

Ney received his BS degree in Civil Engineering at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil, in 1972, and the MS and Dr.-Ing. degrees in Structural Engineering at PUC-Rio, in 1973, and at the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany, in 1978, respectively.

His research interests are in computational mechanics, variational methods, hybrid methods, FEM, BEM, fracture mechanics, time-dependent problems, gradient elasticity and numerical integration methods.

Ney has supervised 60 MS and PhD works. He also has over 150 publications in international journals, conference proceedings, and book chapters. He is Fellow of Wessex Institute, UK, Member of the Board of Principal Editors of WIT Transactions and Associate Editor of EABE – International Journal on Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements.

Keynote Presentation:

“CONCEPTUAL REVIEW OF VARIATIONALLY-BASED HYBRID BOUNDARY ELEMENT METHODS”

The presentation will discuss the hybrid boundary element method (HBEM) which was introduced in 1987 on the basis of the Hellinger-Reissner potential, as a generalization of Pian’s hybrid finite element method. This new two-field formulation makes use of the same fundamental solutions of the collocation boundary element method (CBEM) to interpolate the stress field in the domain of an elastic body, which ends up discretized as a super element with arbitrary shape and arbitrary number of degrees of freedom located along the boundary. Shortly thereafter, a variational counterpart – called hybrid displacement boundary element method (HDBEM) – was proposed by Brebbia and Figueiredo on the basis of the Hu potential and making use of three field functions, with equivalent advantages and disadvantages when compared to the CBEM. The present paper discusses these methods as well as the traditional CBEM. The mathematical and mechanical properties of the resulting matrix equations are investigated and a series of concepts in both HDBEM and CBEM that have not been properly considered by previous authors – particularly concerning convergence issues – are redefined. This review paper does not include a thorough literature survey. It rather completes and extends a paper published by the author in 2003 and carries out a theoretical, comparative analysis of the three methods, with many physical considerations, some recently added conceptual features and a few academic illustrations.

For further information about the George Green Medal, please contact us at the Wessex Institute:

George Green Medal
Wessex Institute
Ashurst Lodge, Ashurst
Southampton
SO40 7AA, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 238 029 3223
Fax: +44 (0) 238 029 2853
Email: wit@wessex.ac.uk

See the following conference web pages for details this and the previous George Green Medal presentations:

• BEM/MRM 41
• BEM/MRM 40
• BEM/MRM 39
• BEM/MRM 37

Prigogine Award 2018 Ceremony

The 2018 Prigogine Gold Medal was awarded to Professor Stuart Kauffman, University of Pennsylvania, USA.

The Prigogine Gold Medal 2018 Award Ceremony took place at the University of Siena on Tuesday 4th September 2018, during the first day of the 10th International Conference on Sustainable Development and Planning (SDP).

The Prigogine Medal was established by the University of Siena and the Wessex Institute of Technology in 2004 to honour the memory of Professor Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Prize Winner for Chemistry.

ILYA PRIGOGINE
Ilya Prigogine was born in Moscow in 1917, and obtained his undergraduate and graduate education in chemistry at the Free University in Brussels. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his contribution to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures. The main theme of his scientific work was the role of time in the physical sciences and biology. He contributed significantly to the understanding of irreversible processes, particularly in systems far from equilibrium. The results of his work have had profound consequences for understanding biological and ecological systems.
Prigogine’s ideas established the basis for ecological systems research. The Prigogine Medal to honour his memory is awarded annually to a leading scientist in the field of ecological systems. All recipients have been deeply influenced by the work of Prigogine.

Previous Prigogine Laureates:
2004 Sven Jorgensen, Denmark
2005 Enzo Tiezzi, Italy
2006 Bernard Patten, USA
2007 Robert Ulanowicz, USA
2008 Ioannis Antoniou, Greece
2009 Emilio del Giudice, Italy
2010 Felix Müller, Germany
2011 Larissa Brizhik, Ukraine
2012 Gerald Pollack, USA
2013 Vladimir Voeikov, Russia
2014 Mae-wan Ho, UK
2015 Bai-Lian Larry Li, USA
2016 Brian Fath, USA
2017 João Carlos Marques, Portugal

The 2018 Medal was awarded to Professor Stuart Kauffman, Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and affiliate faculty at the Institute for Systems Biology.

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STUART KAUFFMAN
Professor Stuart Kauffman is an American medical doctor, theoretical biologist, and complex systems researcher who studies the origin of life on Earth. He was a professor the Universities of Chicago, Pennsylvania and Calgary. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and affiliate faculty at the Institute for Systems Biology. He has a number of awards including a MacArthur Fellowship and a Wiener Medal.

He is best known for arguing that the complexity of biological systems and organisms might result as much from self-organisation and far-from-equilibrium dynamics as from Darwinian natural selection as discussed in his book Origins of Order (1993). In 1967 and 1969 Kauffman used random boolean networks to investigate generic self-organising properties of gene regulatory networks. Using these models, he proposed that cell types are dynamical attractors in gene regulatory networks and that cell differentiation can be understood as transitions between attractors. Recent evidence suggests that cell types in humans and other organisms are attractors. In 1971 he suggested that a zygote may not be able to access all the cell type attractors in its gene regulatory network during development and that some of the developmentally inaccessible cell types might be cancer cell types. This suggested the possibility of "cancer differentiation therapy". He also proposed the self-organised emergence of collectively autocatalytic sets of polymers, specifically peptides, for the origin of molecular reproduction, which have found experimental support.

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SPECIAL PRIGOGINE LECTURE
on
A World Beyond Physics: The Emergence and Evolution of Life
delivered by Professor Stuart Kauffman at the University of Siena, Italy, Spain

The emergence and evolution of life is based on physics but is beyond physics. Evolution is an historical process arising from the non-ergodicity of the universe above the level of atoms. Most complex things will never exist. Human hearts exist. Prebiotic chemistry saw the evolution of many organic molecules in complex reaction networks, and the formation of low energy structures such as membranes. Theory and experiments suggest that from this, the spontaneous emergence of self reproducing molecular systems could arise and evolve. Such “collectively autocatalytic systems” cyclically link non-equilibrium processes whose constrained release of energy constitutes “work” to construct the same constraints on those non-equilibrium processes. Cells yoke a set of non-equilibrium processes and constraints on the energy released as work to build their own constraints and reproduce.

Such systems are living, and can propagate their organization with heritable variations, so can be subject to natural selection. In this evolution, these proto-organisms emerge unprestatably, and afford novel niches enabling, not causing, further types of proto-organisms to emerge. With this, unprestatable new functions arise. The ever-changing phase space of evolution includes these functionalities. Since we cannot prestate these ever new functionalities, we can write no laws of motion for this evolution, which is therefor entailed by no laws at all, and thus not reducible to physics. Beyond entailing law, the evolving biosphere literally constructs itself and is the most complex system we know in the universe.

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For further information about the Prigogine Awards, please contact:

Wessex Institute of Technology
Ashurst Lodge, Ashurst
Southampton
SO40 7AA, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 238 029 3223
Fax: +44 (0) 238 029 2853
Email: wit@wessex.ac.uk

See the following Web pages for details of recent Prigogine Awards:

• Sustainable City 2016
• Sustainable City 2017
• Sustainable Development and Planning 2018

Further details of all Prigogine Awards can be found on our dedicated page: Prigogine Award

New Series Editor: "Innovation and Discovery in Russian Science and Engineering"

Professor Stavros Syngellakis, Adjunct Professor of the Wessex Institute, has been appointed as Joint Series Editor of the book series “Innovation and Discovery in Russian Science and Engineering”, published by Springer. He joins Professor Jerry Connor of MIT, USA, in this role.

Prof Syngellakis brings to this position a wealth of experience as an Editor, not only of two of the books in this Series but also of other books and several journals of which he is Editor-in-Chief and a member of the Editorial Boards. In addition, he reviewed many of the proposals for the Series.

Professor Carlos Brebbia established the Series in collaboration with the Ural Federal University (URFU) in Russia. It currently has seven books listed, six of which have already been published, and the seventh is due to appear shortly. The Wessex Institute is eager to pursue and develop this project, following its successful launch and using the considerable contacts and material Prof Brebbia gathered before he left us.

The Wessex Institute has a formal agreement with URFU and this is one of a number of collaborative projects, including conferences and journal publication, that the two institutions have undertaken.

New Chief Academic Officer: Professor Santiago Hernandez

We are pleased to advise that Professor Santiago Hernandez has recently joined us at WIT, as Chief Academic Officer on a part-time basis. He brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to this position and is a most welcome addition to our senior staff.

Santiago is Full Professor of Structural Engineering at the University of Coruna (Spain). He has extensive experience in structural analysis and design in several fields, ranging from long-span bridges to historical buildings and aircraft. He is well known for his expertise in aeroelasticity and for the application of numerical optimization techniques to engineering design. He is an ASCE and IABSE Fellow, an Associate Fellow of AIAA and also possesses the Eminent Scientist Medal from WIT. He has participated in a large number of research projects at national and international level.

Santiago has been involved with WIT for many years, collaborating in the organisation of short courses and conferences. He was appointed to WIT’s Board of Directors in 1991 and has been involved in shaping the strategy of the Institute since that time.

He has almost three hundred scientific publications, has authored several books and edited books written by leading scientists.

Carlos A. Brebbia Memorial

A celebration of the life of Professor Carlos A. Brebbia was held in the grounds of Ashurst Lodge, on Saturday 19th May 2018. A group of 160 people gathered from many countries, including the USA, Russia, Macedonia, Ukraine, Spain, Belgium, Italy and many from around the UK.

The proceedings began with an opening tribute from Alexander Brebbia, son of Carlos, who spoke of his father’s many achievements and strength of character, illustrating his points by way of several delightful and touching anecdotes about Carlos and their relationship through the years. This was followed by a thorough and interesting account of Carlos’ life and career, given by his oldest friend and colleague, Professor Jerry Connor of MIT in the USA.

Alex Brebbia Wessex Institute, UK		Jerry Connor MIT, USA

After breaking for lunch, a programme of shorter, heartfelt and moving tributes began, given by many friends, colleagues and old-WITonians, including:

Prof Stavros Syngellakis Wessex Institute, UK, Board Member	Dr Bob Adey BEASY, UK
Prof Juan Casares Long University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain,  WIT Board Member	Prof Patrick De Wilde, Free University of Brussels, Belgium, WIT Board Member
Dr Taras Filatov Old WITonian (Ukraine)	Prof Mark Hadfield University of Bournemouth, UK
Prof Santiago Hernandez University of Coruna, Spain WIT Board Member	Prof Alain Kassab, University of Central Florida, USA
Prof Mikhail Kozhevnikov, Ural Federal University, Russia	Dr Julian Lewis, MP, UK
Capt Fernando Mengo, Defence Attaché, Argentine Embassy, London, UK	Prof Derek Northwood, University of Windsor, Canada
Prof Giorgio Passerini University of La Marche, Italy, WIT Board Member	Prof Alex Rabasa, University Miguel Hernandez of Elche, Spain
Prof Jon Trevelyn Durham University, UK	Prof Peter Vorobieff University of New Mexico, USA

The occasion was a fitting celebration of Carlos’ life and all that he achieved. It was touching to hear so many of his friends and colleagues expressing their admiration of him and his work, as well as their commitment to continuing his legacy. We are grateful to all who attended and contributed to making this a very special event.

Please see the Carlos Brebbia Obituary page for further information about his life and achievements.

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Obituary - Professor Carlos A. Brebbia

With profound sadness we announce that Professor Carlos A. Brebbia passed away peacefully on Saturday 3rd March 2018.

Carlos was born in Rosario, Argentina, where he completed his first engineering degree, after being educated at Military Colleges in Santa Fe and Buenos Aires. He spent two years after graduation as part of a small team setting up an Institute of Applied Mechanics. Following this he registered at the University of Southampton in England for a higher degree, arranging to carry out his research partly at MIT. This experience set up the basis for his long and close association with the USA.

After obtaining his PhD at Southampton University he worked for the Central Electricity Research Laboratories in the UK, a leading research establishment at the time. He left the Laboratories to take up an academic position at the University of Southampton where he rose from Lecturer to Senior Lecturer and Reader. During his time at Southampton he took leave to become Visiting Professor at many other Universities, including an academic year at Princeton. After having been appointed Full Professor of Engineering at the University of California, Irvine, he decided to resign his position and return to the UK to set up the Wessex Institute, of which he was the Founder and Director.

Carlos is renowned throughout the world as the originator of the Boundary Element Method, a technique that generates important research work at the Wessex Institute. He has written many scientific papers, been author of 14 books, co-author of numerous volumes and editor or co-editor of over 500. He also published two non-scientific books, “The New Forest. A Personal View” and “Patagonia, a forgotten Land”. A book on the Paraguayan War in the 19th Century was a work in progress at the time of his death.

He founded several successful international Journals including the International Journals of Safety and Security Engineering, Design & Nature and Ecodynamics, Sustainable Development and Planning, Computational Methods and Experimental Measurements, Energy Production and Management, Heritage Architecture, Transport Development and Integration, and the new International Journal of Environmental Impacts.

He established two International prizes, the highly regarded Prigogine Medal for Ecological Systems Research, co-sponsored by the University of Siena; and the George Green Medal, supported by Elsevier and co-sponsored by the University of Mississippi.

Carlos ran a successful WIT programme of international scientific conferences in different locations throughout the world. He helped the Institute to develop academic links with first class institutions around the world, which has resulted in many more research programmes and collaborative projects.

Carlos held many special honours, including the Medaille de la Ville de Paris, Echelon Argent; Medaille of the Masonnet Foundation, University of Liege, Belgium; Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in the UK; Fellow, and Founding President of the American Society of Civil Engineers UK Chapter; Honorary PhD at the University of Bucharest; Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts;  and Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.

In parallel with his academic career, Carlos was a highly successful entrepreneur and founded the Computational Mechanics International Ltd group of companies in 1976. This group’s activities have grown to include software development, engineering consultancy, property investment and publishing. The group works closely with WIT and is responsible for the publishing programme of the Institute which includes, in addition to the conference proceedings, a series of monographs and edited books by some of the foremost scientists in the world.

Whilst we grieve the enormous loss of our Founder and Chairman, whose hard work, determination and achievements during his career are truly inspirational, we know that his earnest desire was for all that he has worked tirelessly to build over many years, to continue to flourish. To this we are firmly committed and so we welcome the continued and future collaboration of our friends and colleagues around the world.

Carlos is survived by his wife, Carolyn, his son Alexander and daughter Isabel, and six grandchildren.